John Bolton, a longtime American foreign policy hawk who previously served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, was indicted on Thursday.
He is accused of illegally keeping top secret documents about covert military attacks and spy materials — and sharing them with “two unauthorized individuals.”
The 18-count federal indictment was filed in Maryland by the local U.S. attorney and national security prosecutors following a lengthy investigation into the way Bolton handled classified documents while writing a memoir that deeply angered Trump during his first term.
Ever since Bolton exited the first Trump administration and became a vocal critic of his foreign policy, Trump has considered him a political enemy. On Thursday at the White House, Trump claimed he did not personally know the details about the criminal charges — but he appeared pleased.
“I think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a bad guy, yeah, a bad guy. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it goes,” Trump said.
Bolton’s indictment follows two other politically-charged cases recently filed by the Department of Justice at Trump’s behest: indictments against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. However, both those other cases were filed by a former White House legal aide, Lindsey Halligan, who sources tell NOTUS was appointed as U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia with specific expectations to pursue cases against those Trump considers to be his political foes.
By contrast, Bolton’s case was handled by Kelly O. Hayes, who was a career prosecutor in Maryland before the White House appointed her to lead the statewide federal office there. The case was also investigated by the National Security Division at DOJ headquarters, and the indictment includes the names of several lawyers there, including trial attorney Derek Shugert, three counterintelligence prosecutors and one trial attorney in the division’s cybersecurity section.
According to the indictment, “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran” hacked into his personal email account sometime in the roughly two years after Bolton left the Trump administration in September 2019. Prosecutors claimed that Bolton had used that email account to send other people what the government considers “national defense information” — which allowed hackers to snatch those documents. The charging documents say that someone on Bolton’s team “notified” the federal government about the hack in July 2021 — but apparently “did not tell the U.S. government that the account contained national defense information, including classified information” from his time in the White House.
The DOJ is accusing Bolton of illegally sharing intelligence about a “future attack by [an] adversarial group in another country,” spy materials that “a foreign adversary was planning a missile launch in the future,” at least two instances of “covert action planned by the U.S. government,” and many other sensitive pieces of information.
A representative for Bolton told NOTUS that the former U.S. official had not yet seen the indictment, which formally accuses him of “retention” and “transmission” of national defense information.
The indictment comes nearly two months after the FBI raided Bolton’s Maryland home, where agents seized his computers and paperwork — including a binder on “allied strikes” and “typed documents in folders labeled ‘Trump I-IV.’”
The new charging documents say that investigators have since confirmed that Bolton, just five days after leaving the White House in September 2019 and while deciding whether to write a memoir, sent two people a six-page document that contained “information that Bolton had learned” while he was Trump’s national security adviser. Bolton went on to share “more than a thousand pages of notes memorializing his time” in that role with these two people in a messaging chat app, according to investigators.
Bolton would go on to engage in a bitter fight with the first Trump administration, which tried to block the release of his book, “The Room Where It Happened.” Although Bolton went through a full review with experienced records officers who were tasked with ensuring that no classified information would be made public, White House lawyers intervened at the last minute in a bid to halt its publication. In the end, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth declined to step in and ruled that the government failed to prove that a court injunction would “prevent irreparable harm.”
But in his closing lines, the judge also issued a warning that now seems prescient.
“Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” the judge wrote in June 2020. “He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability.”